Can long-term stress lead to heart attacks? Most people would probably answer in the affirmative, but the scientific evidence of this is scarce. A new study by researchers from Linköping University in Sweden reveals that the levels of the stress hormone cortisol were increased in the months preceding a heart attack. The results, published in Scientific Reports, suggest that long-term stress is a risk factor for heart attacks. "The levels of the stress hormone cortisol differed between people who have had a heart attack and those not affected. This suggests that cortisol in hair may be a new risk marker for heart attacks. We must take stress seriously", says Professor Tomas Faresjö from the Department of Health, ...

Ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms (rAAA) are responsible for nearly 2% of all deaths in U.S. men over the age of 65. Endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) has emerged as a newer and less invasive alternative to open repair for rAAA, and current guidelines recommend EVAR as a first-line option for treatment of rAAA when certain criteria are met. But researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine have discovered that while EVAR is more commonly utilized for rAA, shortens hospital stay and has a lower initial mortality rate, the odds of ...

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Japan have discovered a recipe for continuous cyclical regeneration of cultured hair follicles from hair follicle stem cells. Scientists have been making waves in recent years by developing ways to grow a variety of useful items in laboratories, from meat and diamonds to retinas and other organoids. At the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Japan, a team led by Takashi Tsuji has been working on ways to regenerate lost hair from stem cells. In an important step, a new study identifies a population of hair follicle stem cells in the skin and a recipe for normal cyclical regeneration in the lab. The researchers took fur and whisker cells ...

Experts from the Natural History Museum, The Francis Crick Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena have joined together to untangle the different meanings of ancestry in the evolution of our species Homo sapiens. Most of us are fascinated by our ancestry, and by extension the ancestry of the human species. We regularly see headlines like 'New human ancestor discovered' or 'New fossil changes everything we thought about our ancestry', and yet the meanings of words like ancestor and ancestry are rarely discussed in detail. In the new paper, published in Nature, experts review our current understanding of how modern human ancestry around the globe can be traced into the distant ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (02/10/2021) -- University of Minnesota Medical School researchers studied SARS-CoV-2 infections at individual cellular levels and made four major discoveries about the virus, including one that validates the effectiveness of remdesivir - an FDA-approved antiviral drug - as a form of treatment for severe COVID-19 disease. "Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the way that each individual responds differently to the infection has been closely studied. In our new study, we examined variations in the way individual cells reacted differently to the coronavirus and responded to antiviral treatment," said Ryan Langlois, PhD, senior author of the study, associate professor in the Department ...

PHILADELPHIA -- Past exposure to seasonal coronaviruses (CoVs), which cause the common cold, does not result in the production of antibodies that protect against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, according to a study led by Scott Hensley, PhD, an associate professor of Microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior studies have suggested that recent exposure to seasonal CoVs protects against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, research from Hensley's team, published in Cell, suggests that if there is such protection, it does not come from antibodies. "We found that many people possessed antibodies that could bind to SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, but these antibodies could not prevent infections," Hensley said. ...

Researchers from the University of Basel have developed a virtual reality app for smartphones to reduce fear of heights. Now, they have conducted a clinical trial to study its efficacy. Trial participants who spent a total of four hours training with the app at home showed an improvement in their ability to handle real height situations. Fear of heights is a widespread phenomenon. Approximately 5% of the general population experiences a debilitating level of discomfort in height situations. However, the people affected rarely take advantage of the available treatment options, such as exposure therapy, which involves putting the person in the anxiety-causing situation under the guidance of a professional. On the one hand, people ...

Rituximab, an anti-cancer drug targeting the membrane protein CD20, was the first approved therapeutic antibody against B tumor cells. Immunologists at the University of Freiburg have now solved a mystery about how it works. A team headed by Professor Dr. Michael Reth used cell cultures, healthy cells, and cells from cancer patients to investigate how CD20 organizes the nanostructures on the B cell membrane. If the protein is missing or Rituximab binds to it, the organization of the B cell surface changes. The resting B cell is activated in the process. The team has published the research in the journal PNAS as part of contributions by new members of the National Academy of Science. B cells are white blood cells and part of the immune system. When they recognize ...

Oncotarget recently published "Melatonin increases overall survival of prostate cancer patients with poor prognosis after combined hormone radiation treatment" which reported that a retrospective study included 955 patients of various stages of prostate cancer who received combined hormone radiation treatment from 2000 to 2019. Comprehensive statistical methods were used to analyze the overall survival rate of PCa patients treated with melatonin in various prognosis groups. The overall survival rate of PCa patients with favorable and intermediate prognoses treated or not treated ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (February 10, 2021) - Brain volume, verbal IQ, and overall IQ are lower in children with Type 1 diabetes (T1D) than in children without diabetes, according to a new longitudinal study published in Diabetes Care, a journal of the American Diabetes Association. The nearly eight-year study, led by Nelly Mauras, MD, a clinical research scientist at Nemours Children's Health System in Jacksonville, Florida, and Allan Reiss MD, a Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, compared brain scans of young children who have T1D with those of non-diabetic children to assess the extent to which glycemic exposure may adversely affect the ...

It was reported that volume of the brain areas such as superior temporal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex reduces in schizophrenia but precise change of three-dimensional structure of neuron has remains unclear. Dr. Itokawa and colleague performed Nanotomography experiments using Fresnel zone plate optics at the BL37XU beamline of the SPring-8 synchrotron radiation facility and at the 32-ID beamline of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) of Argonne National Laboratory. A total of 34 three-dimensional image datasets of layer V of the BA22 cortex were blinded ...

The recent review, published in Environment International and led by the University of Tartu, summarises the effect of aquatic pollution on cancer prevalence in wild animals with the help of more than 300 reviewed studies. Authors shed light on understudied yet important fields in cancer research in wild animals - summarising the key effects and pointing to future research avenues to crack the puzzle of why cancer develops in polluted environments. „What was immediately evident was the bias towards fish in current research into aquatic wildlife cancer. However, given this bias it is especially interesting ...

Sophia Antipolis, 10 February 2021: A nationwide US study has found increasing death rates from heart disease in women under 65. The research is published in European Heart Journal - Quality of Care and Clinical Outcomes, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1 The study found that while death rates from cancer declined every year between 1999 and 2018, after an initial drop, heart disease death rates have been rising since 2010. "Young women in the US are becoming less healthy, which is now reversing prior improvements in heart disease deaths," said senior author Dr. Erin Michos of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, US. "With ...

Satellite images reveal that the timing of algal blooms in the Red Sea may affect the next haul of sardines and squid by commercial fisheries. Rising temperatures in the Red Sea have changed the timing of phytoplankton blooms. These microscopic algae form the base of many marine food webs and so are critical to ocean biodiversity and the industries that they support on land, such as fisheries and tourism. A team led by KAUST climate modeler Ibrahim Hoteit has used satellite images to study the phenology of algal blooms in the northern Red Sea and ...

A new method has enabled the natural structure of particularly large and complex enzymes to be revealed. Scientists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and TU Berlin have published their findings in the journal Cell Reports. They investigated a multi-enzyme complex that plays an essential role in metabolism and have discovered that it functions differently than previously thought. This will help scientists better understand certain diseases. Enzymes are a cell's biocatalysts. They accelerate chemical reactions in the body or ensure that these reactions even take place at all. As a result, they play an extremely important role in metabolism. Individual enzymes frequently form a complex with many subunits, as in the case of the ...

In a study conducted at the University of Helsinki, Finland, 136 adults adhered to one of three study diets for 12 weeks. One of them corresponded to the average Finnish diet, containing roughly 70% animal-derived protein of total protein, while most of the plant-based protein originated from cereal products. In the second study diet, half of the protein was derived from plant products and the other half from animal products, while the third one contained 30% animal protein and 70% plant-based protein of total protein. Sources of animal protein, both red and white meat as well as dairy products, were partially replaced with plant-based proteins by adding a diverse range of legumes, nuts, ...

Your breath holds the key to monitoring fat burning, and now a research group from Tohoku University has created a compact and low-cost device that can measure how our body metabolizes fat. The device uses an ultraviolet lamp to gauge exhaled acetone gas, which is produced in the blood through the metabolic reaction of fat. "Precise measurements of acetone gas concentration allows us to determine the body's ability to metabolize fat and develop exercise methods for efficient fat burning," says Professor Yuji Matsuura from Tohoku University's Graduate School of Biomedical ...

Many natural and human-made networks, such as computer, biological or social networks have a connectivity structure that critically shapes their behavior. The academic field of network science is concerned with analyzing such real-world complex networks and understanding how their structure influences their function or behavior. Examples are the vascular network of our bodies, the network of neurons in our brain, or the network of how an epidemic is spreading through a society. The need for reliable null models The analysis of such networks often focuses on finding interesting properties and features. For example, does the structure of a particular contact network help diseases spread ...

The research team led by Masakazu Ohara, graduate student of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology (student in the Leading Program doctoral program); Associate Professor Kowa Koida of the Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute; and Associate Professor Juno Kim of the University of New South Wales (Australia) discovered that when people judge the thickness of an object, objects with glass-like transparent optical properties are perceived to be flatter than they actually are. It was previously known that objects made of metallic or glossy materials are perceived to be thicker than what they are, but now the current research has identified that transparent ...

A description of gravity compatible with the principles of quantum mechanics has long been a widely pursued goal in physics. Existing theories of this 'quantum gravity' often involve mathematical corrections to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (HUP), which quantifies the inherent limits in the accuracy of any quantum measurement. These corrections arise when gravitational interactions are considered, leading to a 'Generalized Uncertainty Principle' (GUP). Two specific GUP models are often used: the first modifies the HUP with a linear correction, while the second introduces a quadratic one. Through new research published in EPJ C, Serena Giardino and Vincenzo ...

A unique 'heart-shape', with wisps of gas filaments showing an intricate honeycomb-like arrangement, has been discovered at the centre of the iconic supernova remnant, the Crab Nebula. Astronomers have mapped the void in unprecedented detail, creating a realistic three-dimensional reconstruction. The new work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Crab, formally known as Messier 1, exploded as a dramatic supernova in 1054 CE, and was observed over the subsequent months and years by ancient astronomers across the ...

Dimerization (Note: combination of two identical or different molecules) of the human neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin can produce new types of bioactive molecules. In a recent study, an international research team led by MedUni Vienna and the University of Vienna demonstrated that dimerized and therefore significantly larger versions of oxytocin and vasopressin are still able to activate their receptors. Such new constructs provide several opportunities to optimize the efficacy of these neuropeptides for therapeutic application. The researchers were inspired for this approach from naturally occurring dimers. The results have been published in the journal "Chemical Science". Oxytocin/vasopressin receptors are typical examples of so-called G protein-coupled receptors - the most ...

In order for a drug to be effective at the right places in the body, it helps if scientists can predict as accurately as possible how the molecules of that drug will interact with human cells. In a joint research project, scientists from Collaborative Research Centre 1423 at Leipzig University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai have succeeded in elucidating such a structure, namely that of the neuropeptide Y receptor Y2 with one of its ligands. This is the first time that a molecular blueprint for this receptor is available, which will enable the development of tailor-made new drugs, for example to treat epilepsy or cardiovascular diseases. The researchers' findings have now been published in Nature Communications. The Y2 receptor plays ...

"Insulin is a prime example for a successful peptide drug that has been essential for the health of millions of diabetic patients in the past 100 years," says Markus Muttenthaler, who leads research groups at the Institute of Biological Chemistry of the Faculty of Chemistry at University in Vienna as well as at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Worldwide, peptide therapeutics account for 5% of the global pharmaceutical market, with global sales exceeding US$ 50 billion. More than 150 peptides are in clinical development and another 400-600 peptides undergoing preclinical ...

Children with epilepsy sleep poorly compared to healthy children, and are more likely to experience disruptions such as night terrors, sleep walking or sleep disordered breathing, according to a new study. A team at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Human Brain Health analysed 19 published studies on sleep and epilepsy in children and adolescents to try to better understand and articulate the links between them. Their findings, published in Sleep Medicine Reviews, highlight the significantly poorer sleep experienced by children and adolescents with epilepsy, and present a strong argument for screening children for sleep problems as an integral part of diagnosis and management of the condition. Lead author Alice Winsor explains: "We know that sleep and epilepsy ...